Too Close to Home (5 page)

FOUR

B
EFORE I COULD ASK BARRY anything else, our attention was caught by an approaching car. It was a big black vehicle, and it was slowing down at the end of the lane. Barry rolled his eyes and said, “Oh boy, we can all rest easy now, the big man is here.”

It was a Mercury Grand Marquis with heavily tinted windows. I could only see the car in profile, but I knew that the license plates on it read “PF 1.” What with all the other police vehicles up there, there was no room for the Mercury to pull over, so the driver opted to put on the flashers and block a lane of traffic.

Barry and I were standing side by side now, waiting for the great man’s appearance. Barry said to me, “Tell me why you did it.”

“Excuse me?” I was still thinking about the Langleys, and found Barry’s question a bit jarring.

“Why’d you punch him in the nose? How many times you going to make me ask you?”

“That’s just a rumor, Barry.”

“There’s not a civil servant in Promise Falls, or anybody else in town for that matter, who doesn’t know you punched the mayor in the nose,” Barry said. “It’s like our own urban legend.”

“You can’t believe everything you hear,” I said.

“Well, this is one of those stories I choose to believe,” Barry said. “This, and the one about Elvis working as a short-order cook at that diner just north of town.” He was watching the driver get out of the Grand Marquis. He was a tall man, lean, late thirties, with short blond hair except around back, where it hung down over his collar, mullet-style. “I mean, the mayor shows up at a council meeting, his nose the size of an orange, and guess who just happens to no longer be on the mayor’s payroll? Just think, you could still be working with Lance there if you hadn’t gone and fucked things up.”

“I’m happy with the way things have worked out,” I said.

The driver had his hand on the back door of the town car.

“What I heard is, even though you punched the mayor right in his fucking nose, you asked him for a letter of reference afterwards, and you got it,” Barry said. “I guess that was before you decided to go into business for yourself. Anyway, that tells me that you’ve got something on him that’s pretty fucking amazing. I mean, he never even pressed charges, and if there was ever a vindictive bastard out there, it’s Randall Finley.”

And with that, the door opened, and Mayor Finley emerged from the car.

He was a small man, a textbook case of the Napoleon complex. Carried himself like he was six-four instead of five-four. He’d opted to leave his jacket in the car, too, and gave his trousers a hitch as he stood on the hot pavement, gazing at the crime scene through a pair of Oakleys.

“Detective Duckworth!” he called out to Barry.

I whispered to him, “Show me how you scurry.”

But Barry approached the mayor at a regular pace, like he was trying hard not to run, not wanting me to think he jumped every time the mayor asked him to, even if that was exactly what he did.

As Barry closed in on the mayor, his driver, wearing a pair of casual slacks and the kind of blue T that looked like it cost a couple of hundred bucks, walked in my direction.

“Cutter,” he said. “My old man Cutter.”

“Lance,” I said. If ever there was a guy the name “Lance” was made for, it was Lance Garrick.

“Lots of excitement around here today,” he said, forming a grin.

“My neighbors were murdered,” I said. “My son just lost his best friend.”

Lance shrugged. “Shit does happen. Especially around you.” I didn’t see the point in responding to that. I couldn’t see where engaging in small talk with the guy who held the job I’d walked away from was going to make an already bad day any better.

“Mayor got the call,” Lance said, recovering his dignity. “About Langley. Wanted to take a run by, see what was happening. He knew Langley pretty good, you know?”

I nodded.

“So,” Lance said, looking up the road at my truck, chuckling under his breath. “How’s the lawn-cutting business?”

“Good,” I said.

“You’re something else, Cutter,” Lance said. “Quitting a good gig like this to go around mowing lawns. I used to do that when I was a kid. There were a few houses on my street.” He shook his head in mock puzzlement. “Of course, I didn’t have a little tractor to run around on. That must be fun. But even if I knew I could get myself a tractor, not sure it’s the sort of thing I’d have dreamed of doing when I grew up. Is there like a course you take, some sort of degree you can get out at Thackeray? Weed Eating 101? Hey, you ever thought of branching out? Maybe get a paper route?”

“You certainly made the right call, Lance,” I said. “You get to wipe the mayor of Promise Falls’s ass any time you want. I envy you.”

Lance pretended to laugh at that one. “Yeah, well, if I got fired from a job, I’d want to put it down, too.” If that was what Lance wanted to think, that I’d been fired, that was fine by me.

Barry was walking back from his chat with the mayor and said to me, “He wants to talk to you.”

“So he can ask me,” I said. “Since when do you deliver his messages?”

Barry looked embarrassed, but was spared from having to explain himself when Randall Finley shouted over to me, “Hey, Cutter! Gotta minute?”

I walked over. As I approached I realized the Grand Marquis was still running, belching out exhaust into the hot, humid air. Waves of heat rose off the hood, like if I looked into them long enough I’d see a mirage.

“Hell of a thing,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve told Barry to put everything he’s got on this,” Finley said.

“I’m sure he will.”

“Albert, he was a good man. He did work for me over the years. Good guy. Horrible thing.”

“Yep.”

“And living next door to something like that, that would sure give me the willies,” he said. When I said nothing, he continued, “Look, you should drop by the office sometime. I’ve hardly seen you since you left.”

“I’ve been pretty busy,” I told him.

“How’s Ellen?” he asked. If you didn’t know him better, you’d think he was actually interested. “Still working at the college under Conrad?” He caught himself. “That didn’t sound right, did it?”

“Randall, is there anything I can do for you today, or did you just want to get caught up on old times?”

“I just wanted you to know that everything that can be done to find out what happened here will be done. This is a terrible crime. Promise Falls has never seen anything like this. A triple murder. One of the city’s best-known citizens, a noted criminal lawyer, dead.”

I wanted to go back and check on Derek. I began turning to walk away when Randall Finley said, “Cutter, you owe me more respect than that. I did you a favor. Assaulting a public official, a mayor for fuck’s sake. You could have done time. I took a lot of things into consideration to let that slide.”

I turned back, walked up to Finley until my nose was within a couple of inches of his, although that meant stooping just a tad. “You want to lay a charge, it’s probably not too late. It’s only been a couple of years. I’m sure Barry over there would take your statement.”

Mayor Finley smiled and slapped me on the side of my shoulder. “Hey, listen, I’m just messin’ with ya. Fact is, I still wish I had you working for me. Lance there, he’s okay, but he spends a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror, always checking his hair, making sure he hasn’t got something stuck in his teeth. I liked you. You were always there to watch my back.”

“There’s a lot of people in this town who’d be happy to stick something in it,” I said. “Pretty much everybody on the city payroll that you’ve accused of not doing their jobs, and most recently, a houseful of unwed mothers.”

Finley waved his hand. “Oh that,” he said. “Just a little misunderstanding. That never would have happened if you’d been working for me. You’d have never let me go in there and make a goddamn fool of myself.”

“What else does Lance let you do that he shouldn’t?” I asked.

Finley grinned nervously. “Nothing,” he said. “He’s actually not that bad. I just have to make sure he doesn’t set me up on any bad blind dates, if you get my meaning.” He flashed me a grin.

“I’m going to go see how my family is,” I said, then turned my back on the mayor and walked away.

He shouted after me, loud enough for others to hear, “Will do, Jim! Anything you need, you let me know.”

As I passed Barry he said to me, “The nose thing? No jury would ever have convicted you.”

I FOUND ELLEN AND DEREK sitting at the kitchen table. He had his head in his hands and she was turned toward him, reaching out and touching him tentatively.

“It’s a shock, I know,” Ellen said softly as I came into the room and stood just inside the doorway. Derek shook his head, not looking up, not taking his hands away. “We’re all in shock. And it’s not going to make any sense, not until we know why it happened. And it may not make any sense after that, either.”

Ellen turned toward me, gave me a hopeless look. I noticed there was half a glass of white wine in a tall-stemmed glass on the counter. She caught me looking at it.

I went over to my son and rested my hands on his shoulders, not sure what words at this time could make things any better. He took his hands away from his face and, without turning to look at me, dragged one of my hands down around his neck, pulling me down close to him. Ellen moved closer, and we both held on to our son while he continued to weep.

FIVE

T
HE POLICE WERE IN and out of the house so much that afternoon, Ellen made coffee for those who wanted it on such a hot day, and iced tea for those looking for something cold. I noticed Ellen offered wine to no one, and had finished off her glass and put it in the dishwasher before playing hostess. I wasn’t sure whether Barry Duckworth and the other cops kept coming inside because they thought there was something we’d forgotten to mention, or they just wanted to get into the airconditioning.

Derek finally settled down and retreated to his room, where he alternated between fiddling with his computers and lying facedown on his bed. He seemed very tired, as though he’d had next to no sleep the night before.

When it appeared we were going to get a break from questioning, Ellen poured us each some iced tea, which we took out onto our back deck. It’s well shaded out there, and there’s usually at least a trace of a breeze.

We sat down in our wooden Adirondack chairs—what I still thought of as Muskoka chairs from when my parents would head up to a cottage in that region of Ontario every summer—and didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Ellen took a sip of her tea and said, “You think he’s going to be okay?”

“Eventually,” I said. “How many kids lose a best friend that way?”

“I’ve always felt so safe here,” she said. “Never again.”

I let those two words hang out there for a while before I spoke. “What happened at the Langleys’ doesn’t have to mean we’re any less safe than we’ve ever been.”

Ellen glanced over at me. “What do you mean?”

“What happened there, there’s no reason it has to have anything to do with us.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” She pointed. “It happened
right there
.”

“What I’m saying is,” I said, “things like that don’t happen for no reason at all. And whatever that reason was, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

“Unless it was some crazy psycho picking people at random,” Ellen said.

“Even then,” I said.

Ellen shook her head, dismissing me. “I don’t get you. Is this you trying to put the best possible spin on a situation?”

“Bear with me for a second,” I said. “Let’s go through the various scenarios. Like murder-suicide.”

“The police didn’t say anything about it being a murder-suicide.”

“I know. I’m just saying, if that’s what it was. If it was a murder-suicide, it’s this self-contained tragedy. Horrible, yes, but it doesn’t impact on our safety one way or another.”

“Okay,” she said, so far unconvinced.

“Now, since it doesn’t appear to be a murder-suicide, let’s move on to the next scenario, which is that the Langleys were killed for a specific reason. Or maybe just Langley himself, and Donna, and Adam, they were killed because they were witnesses, something like that. Maybe it’s related to some case Langley’s been working on, maybe the one where he got that kid off, the one who beat the other kid to death. I’m sure Barry’ll be combing through all his files, interviewing others at the law firm, looking at all the things Langley’s been up to, who might be pissed at him because he didn’t keep them out of jail, and those who might be pissed that he kept others from going to jail they thought should have.”

“Try to say that one again,” Ellen said.

“Yeah, well, you get my drift. Regardless, there could have been a specific reason for what happened, which again means there’s no reason for us to be worried for ourselves.”

I watched Ellen for some kind of reaction. There wasn’t much of one, but her skepticism was detectable. “This is what you do,” she said. “You always find reasons for me not to be worried. Well, this is something to worry about. It could have been a robbery. Someone broke into the Langleys’ and ended up killing them. You can’t tell me something like that couldn’t happen here, couldn’t happen anyplace.”

“Okay, point taken. Let’s say it’s a robbery, or some totally random, crazy act. A roaming serial killer. He happens upon the Langley house out of the blue. The odds of something like that happening to a family, even though there’s a serial killer industry out there in the movies that makes everyone fucking paranoid, are absolutely a million to one. Probably a few hundred million to one. When you figure the odds are like that, what are the odds that something like that would also happen to the people who lived right next door?”

“That’s your theory,” Ellen said. “That we’re somehow bulletproof”—and then she winced at her own analogy—“because it’d be like lightning striking twice. A crazed serial killer isn’t going to hit two houses side by side.”

I took a sip of my iced tea. “Yeah.” Another argument had occurred to me. “Let’s say it was the other way around, that something good had happened to the Langleys. Let’s say they’d won the New York State lottery. Would you feel like you were next in line to win?”

“I’d probably at least go out and buy a ticket,” Ellen said. She studied me for a moment, then said, “I think you’re talking out of your ass. We should put the house on the market and get the hell out of here.” Then she got out of her chair and went back inside.

To be honest, even as I was saying it, I knew I was talking out my ass, too.

WE HAD SEVERAL CALLS from reporters. A young woman from the
Promise Falls Standard
tried to get a quote out of Ellen when she answered the phone, and when I took two different calls from the
Times Union
and the
Democrat-Herald
in Albany, I said I had nothing to say. Something I’d learned while working for the mayor’s office was that it was very rare someone’s life got better after being quoted in a newspaper. I also spotted an assortment of TV news vans up on the highway at different times through the day, but the cops weren’t letting anyone come down the lane. I figured Barry would be happy to answer questions for the cameras. He loved to be on TV, loved to see himself on the evening news. I just hoped he thought to tuck in his shirt beforehand. I wasn’t sure viewers were ready for a shot of his hairy, perspiring gut.

When cops weren’t actually questioning us, they were wandering all over the place. Guys in white Hazmat suits had been through the Langley home. Others were wandering through the backyard of the house, like they were examining each blade of grass. One time, looking out our front window, I caught glimpses of them taking baby steps through the woods, searching for what, I had no idea. Later in the day, a towing firm on contract with the Promise Falls Police Department hauled away Albert Langley’s Saab SUV and Donna Langley’s Acura.

Late afternoon, the phone rang yet again and I picked up.

“Jim.”

There aren’t that many people who can put so much into one word. Who can, in doing nothing more than speaking your own name to you, somehow assert their authority and sense of superiority. Conrad Chase packed arrogance and pretension and condescension into a single syllable like he was stuffing an overnight bag with a truckload of cow shit. Maybe he was entitled to. He was a former professor who’d become the president of Thackeray College, a onetime bestselling author, and on top of all that, he was Ellen’s boss. He’d been involved in our lives, in one way or another, from the moment we’d moved to Promise Falls, and maybe by now I should have found a way to tolerate him. But some things don’t come easily to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Conrad.”

“Jim,” Chase said, “I just heard about Albert. And Donna, and their boy, Adam, too? Good God, it’s beyond imagining.”

“That’s right, Conrad.”

“How are you folks doing? How’s Derek? He and Adam were friends, weren’t they? And Ellen? How’s she bearing up?”

“I’ll put her on.”

“No, that’s okay, I don’t want to disturb her.”

Of course he didn’t.

“I just wanted to see how you all were doing. Illeana and I, we’re terribly upset about all this, and while it’s horribly tragic for the Langleys, it must be a shock for you, living right next door to something like this. Did you hear anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“They were all shot, isn’t that right?”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Three people, shot to death, Jesus, and you didn’t hear anything?”

Like it was our fault. Or maybe just mine. If I’d heard something, if I’d heard the first shot, maybe I could have prevented it from being the total bloodbath it turned out to be.

“No,” I said. “We didn’t hear anything.”

“Do the police know what happened?” Conrad asked. “Surely to God it wasn’t a murder-suicide kind of thing.”

“Doesn’t appear to be that,” I said. “But beyond that, I really don’t know.”

“Illeana and I, we’ll drop by, see how you’re doing,” he said.

“We’ll certainly look forward to that,” I said.

“Okay then,” he said. For an acclaimed author and former English professor who should know a thing or two about irony, Conrad seemed strangely oblivious to sarcasm.

“I’ll tell Ellen you called,” I said, and hung up.

By nightfall, things seemed to be settling down, but it would be a stretch to say things were back to normal. I wondered whether life around here would ever really be normal again. But Ellen and I did pull together a dinner—nothing too fancy, a salad and burgers on the barbecue—and the three of us did sit together at the table to eat.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation, however.

Ellen told me to take it easy after dinner, go watch TV or read the paper, she’d clean up. I wondered if what she really wanted was for me to leave her alone in the kitchen. I left for a few minutes, then wandered back in on the pretext of making some coffee, and saw an almost empty wineglass next to the sink, where Ellen was standing. She was reaching for it when I said, “Hey.”

She jumped, and as she turned knocked the glass into the sinkful of hot, soapy water.

“Jesus,” she said. “Don’t do that. Especially now.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Of course I’m fine. I mean, Jesus, no, I’m not fine. Who could be fucking fine?”

I took the long-stemmed glass from the water, set it on the counter. “It might get broken,” I said, “in there with the regular stuff.”

Ellen looked at me. “I was just taking the edge off.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s been that kind of day,” she said. “If there ever was a day I’m entitled to a drink, this is it. At least I’m not smoking again.”

I nodded and went back to the living room.

The police told us they’d be leaving someone at the scene around the clock for the next few days. There was a black and white car parked up by the highway, and police tape still surrounded the Langley house, as if pranksters had toilet-papered the place, but neatly, and with yellow tissue.

The police presence didn’t make it any easier for Ellen to get to sleep. She went through the house several times, checking doors and windows. She asked me to do a check of the shed, standing on the back-door step while I went round the truck—the cops had finally let me bring my rig in from the highway—and examined the building where I kept my mowers and tools and other incidentals, including my old artwork.

“All clear,” I said, stepping back into the house, not mentioning that our property was surrounded by trees, and that if someone was watching us, he’d hardly need to use the shed to hide himself. The number of places where one could hide seemed limitless.

We got into bed, and Ellen tried reading for a while but finally put her book aside. “I keep going through the same paragraph over and over again,” she said, “and haven’t the foggiest idea what I’ve just read.”

I wanted to say something along the lines of “Rereading Conrad’s book, are you?” but managed to hold my tongue. “Not easy to focus at the moment, is it?” I said.

She shook her head, placed the book by the base of her bedside lamp, reached up and twisted the knob to turn it off. I got under the covers and we both stared at the ceiling for a while. I don’t know for how long, but I must have finally fallen asleep, because I was having that dream, where I’m on the lawn tractor, climbing a hill that’s getting steeper and steeper, until the front end of the mower lifts off the ground and starts going over my head and—

Ellen jabbed me in the side, sometime around midnight, and I awoke with a start.

“What?” I said. “The smoke detector?”

“No, not that!” she whispered urgently.

“What?” I said, my heart instantly pounding.

“I heard something.”

“What? Where?”

“A door. I heard a door downstairs.”

“Maybe you dreamt it.”

“No,” she said. “I was already awake. I haven’t been able to get to sleep yet.”

I threw back the covers and, wearing only a pair of dark blue boxers, slipped out the bedroom door. “Be careful!” Ellen whispered.

I whispered back, “Call the police.” If by some chance we were being visited by the same folks who’d gone to the Langleys’ the night before—my theories of the afternoon seemed pretty pitiful all of a sudden—the time to call for help was now, not later. I didn’t know what had happened to the cruiser up by the highway, whether it was still posted out there or not, and there was no way to tell, standing outside our bedroom door in the dark of night.

As I went by Derek’s door I noticed it was closed, which suggested to me he was in there, asleep, although Derek didn’t exactly keep us posted as to his comings and goings. I went down the stairs, feeling naked not so much because I was in nothing but a pair of shorts, but because I had nothing in my hands. We don’t keep guns in the house, but right about then I’d have been happy for one. I’d have settled for a baseball bat, but we didn’t have one of those either, at least not anyplace handy. Down in the basement, maybe, tucked away behind the furnace. Perhaps, if I could make it to the kitchen without running into anyone first, I could arm myself with a cast-iron frying pan, or the fire extinguisher that hung on the wall right next to the stove. You wouldn’t want to get hit in the head with that sucker.

As I reached the first floor I could hear Ellen on the phone upstairs, whispering urgently. Across the living room I spotted a poker hanging among the tools next to the fireplace. That would do.

I crept over toward it, delicately slipping the pointed iron bar out of its holder. I liked the heft of it in my hand and felt, while not relieved, at least slightly better prepared.